That's a problem for elementary schools, not colleges.
Well, it's a problem for high schools too, but that's because it's school computers and HS students tend to be dicks when it comes to other people's property. That issue applies to both slot- and tray-loading drives, though.
That's a completely different scope of work. Spreadsheets are fine for personal use. Even sharing with one person can get hairy unless you have version control in place - and if you're smart enough to set up version control, you'll already be doing this with a DB. A list of what movies you want to see isn't generally a multi-user collaboration.
Though if policy allows it, a Google Spreadsheet could still apply fairly well in this kind of situation. It retains all of the freeform flexibility of a spreadsheet while giving the availability of a DB-driven app. Presumably if you'll have access to a networked, DB-driven app (whether it's a web page or a standalone exe), you'll have web access. Might as well make that work for you and go with something that already exists.
Yes, exactly. And it's only the uninstaller that's damaging - the program itself is just useless. In order to be damaged by this, you have to, in order: 1) Jailbreak your iPhone 2) Add standard third-party sources 3) Download and install specific, known good third-party applications (the BSD subsystem and a few misc utils by Erica Sadun, I believe) 4) Manually add a third-party application XML feed (typing in the feed address by hand, as it's not listed under third party sources) 5) Find and download this application 6) Uninstall this application, which then (thanks to a bad uninstaller line in the XML) removes the apps from step 3
You can repair the damage fairly easily as well, by simply editing the XML for the installed apps, removing the ones that were damaged from that list (since their uninstaller fails as the files are already missing), and reinstall them. No damage is even done unless you uninstall the problem app, and the damage only messes up a select few third-party tools.
It's not quite as simple as someone with an EDGE/WiFi card in their laptop noticing your presence and zapping something to your phone over the airwaves, or even as simple as visiting a malicious website (though the latter is certainly plausible if you're running an un-jailbroken phone with 1.1.1 firmware or earlier).
I'd say $2 rentals is more than reasonable. Apple's downloads range from $3-5 for one day, and while I can't speak for blockbuster, most small independent stores are at least $4 for a few days.
Sure, unlimited might be throttled a bit if you're clearly just ripping and returning, but they have these crazy things called operating costs that they have to cover: postage on both directions and buying the movies (and replacing stuff that becomes damaged, though I'd assume the person doing the damage is charged) in addition to the standard costs of doing business (employees, utilities, legal, etc).
While they definitely have bulk deals set up with the post office, that's still going to be a good chunk of the two bucks. Then knock off the price of the disc per rental (40c maybe? Figure it's bought for around $12 and gets rented out to 30 people before it needs replacing). That doesn't leave much room for bill-paying revenue.
Sounds about right. This so-called 'worm' is nothing more than a useless file - THAT YOU HAVE TO CHOOSE TO INSTALL - with a bad uninstaller script. It's about as much a worm as typing 'sudo rm -rf/' into the terminal because some stranger on the internet said it's a good idea (for the uninformed, it's a great idea, and definitely try it and give it your root password when prompted)*.
The only known actual exploit on the iPhone is the TIFF exploit that JailBreakMe.com uses for powers of good (which, while jailbreaking the phone, also patches the exploit it used to do so). People that didn't use that hack likely updated to 1.1.2 firmware, which also patches that hole.
No, it's (most irrelevantly) not a corporate blackberry replacement. It's not really perfect at anything, though I'll say that the solitaire game really lends it self fantastically to the touch interface. But unlike most multifunction devices which really half-ass everything, it does most things quite well and the sacrifices made are understandable and more importantly are not deal-breakers.
*Hey, I'm a stranger on the internet. What did you expect, candy?
Seconded, thoroughly - in addition I would like some decent gui tools for single-user data-storage requirements; it's annoying that any pc user who wants to maintain a list of (contacts/friends/must-see-movies/must-read-books/etc) puts everything into a spreadsheet.
Well, there's nothing fundamentally wrong with that. A spreadsheet is effectively just a less structured database, and given that you're talking about freeform data... and in any case those kind of lists aren't going to have enough data that a spreadsheet becomes inappropriate.
And to be honest, does it really matter what method they're using to make their lists? I'd rather be sent a CSV than a SQL file, and despite being a proponent of open standards, I can still open up an Excel file no problem. Yeah, I'd prefer to see just sharing out a page on Google Docs or just being handed a sheet of paper, but that's life.
The last time this was an issue for me, it was probably 1999 with one of those awesome Thinkpads with the Ultrabay flip-up keyboard and a Ni-Cd battery. I've owned three iPods and an iPhone and all have had zero battery issues; likewise for all Li-Ion laptops I've used that I can remember, which is quite a few.
Removing ease of access allows you to remove the components that bring that ease of access. Hinges, doors, flaps, and sockets all take space. Sticking it all behind a big shell takes less space. Apple wanted a thin notebook, so guess which route they took.
It's not a subnotebook. It's a thin notebook that sacrificed an optical drive to be really thin. This is exactly the same width and depth as the standard Macbook (give or take a couple hundredths of an inch). It even retains the insanely thick bezels around the edge of the screen of the Macbook. The eee is a subnotebook. This is just a very attractive, very thin standard notebook.
But yeah, you're spot-on about the lock-in nonsense. If you want a thin machine, ditching the optical drive and moving to a 1.8" drive is the way to do it. It's been rumored for months that if Apple made a thin/small/light/sub notebook, it wouldn't have an optical drive. It's not like streaming DVD-quality video over 802.11n is a challenge - I can stream 1080p through two floors where I can't even see 802.11g signal./wanted the new 12" that apparently just wasn't meant to be. desperately. *sobbing*
4) IQ test the entire country. People who fail are pushed off the nearest bridge. People who get below a point determined to be reasonably intelligent (100 is average, not smart) get sent to Texas, which is to be denounced as a state.
I think from there, the problems should solve themselves.
Like so many things, UPNP is a tradeoff between security and convenience. Want a stronger password? You have to type in an annoying password every time you want to do anything. Want secure WiFi? Then make sure you write down your 64+character alphanumeric nonsense passphrase and be sure to add your MAC address into the allowed users table, after going through a second insane password to hit your router's config panel. Want to lower the risk of a break-in? Then set or open both a lock and deadbolt every time you pass through the door.
In the case of UPNP, I go for convenience. I know the risks, but I also know enough about how to avoid this that the convenience is worth the risk for me.
Transfer distance relating to security is a non-issue unless you have some really idiotic software designers. Unless your device is not only broadcasting its presence (in a rather Bonjour-ish way) but doing so without either having a system password or at the very least something to authorize the transfer, it's not going to be like an RFID tag that just spits out data if you get close enough with the right gear.
Of course, counting on not having idiotic coders is a fairly big risk to take these days. I mean... so long as they test things - we all make mistakes (just yesterday I spotted a bug in the login system for a site I'm making that was using "=" instead of "===" so it always validated to true, luckily it was an easy enough fix), it's just a matter of making sure we catch them. Given the quality of so much 1.0 software (or any major version without a point release) these days, I'd say that there should be a hell of a market for QA outsourcing.
This is true. A friend of mine is a huge Obama support (as I am for Paul), and neither of us genuinely believe that there was fraud. I certainly can't rule it out and I'm more skeptical than is my friend, but I tend to be that way. His reasoning is that Obama's position percentage-wise didn't change much from the polls; rather, Hillary picked up a lot more undecided votes and took some away from Edwards from something he said regarding that whole tearing up thing. I doubt it happened because I think Paul would have come in much lower than the 8-9% or so he got had there been fraud.
More importantly, both candidates really had pretty poor buzz and advertisements going on due to a lack of organization. Paul's ads here were almost entirely focused on illegal immigration, where they would have been much better focused on civil liberties, personal freedoms, and probably economic policy. Obama's supporters used the same approach that they used in Iowa, which is really no good around here both because of the difference between a caucus and a primary and also that with such an energy- and buzz-driven campaign, going door-to-door the day of the election is not going to be nearly as effective as getting people at the election sites trying to sway the undecideds.
Still, I'd never rule anything out (I really am a conspiracy theorist at heart), and wouldn't be surprised if there was fraud or even genuinely unintentional error. But I don't suspect it to be the case here as the results weren't too far off from what I thought given the opinions of most people I knew. If anyone should be screaming fraud, it's me - and I'm not.
I'm pretty sure that everyone who owns an iPhone already has a copy of iTunes installed. It's not at all unrelated to the phone, as you suggest is the case. Remember, it's more than just a phone, and iTunes handles a lot more than activation. At least it HAS that interface - most phones you're lucky to be able to attach to your PC without a $30 cable and hugely overpriced and gimped software (this is finally starting to slowly change, thankfully), and you're quite limited in how you can interact. For all the flaws of the iPhone - and I know about all of them as an owner - it's still a solid piece of hardware and the way it interfaces with my computer is half the reason I bought the thing. Linux users being SOL is not exactly a new thing, and it's certainly not limited to a single phone.
But yeah, re: activation, bureaucracy and a good chunk of change are indeed part of the painful process. Back when I had to get my previous phone with Verizon, it nearly did qualify as torture (the experience was horrendously awful, not to mention the wait - I was able to put my name on a list, go to the mall for lunch and check out their small Verizon store, come back, and still wait another half hour, only to wait another hour after finally getting help to actually buy the thing). My iPhone activation could have gone smoother, but I managed to have everything going against me when I was doing so (Vermont number with Verizon though I'd since moved; AT&T wasn't legally allowed to let me keep that number as they don't offer service in VT, regardless of the fact that my home and billing address were in a location where they do indeed offer service. This among several other things that wouldn't have effected most people). I still considered the process, on the whole, less painful than the last time I'd dealt with Verizon.
That was my point. But DBs are not like a page file where you're constantly banging on the same file with updates. Unless your drive is very near full capacity, this will generally be a non-issue from wear leveling regardless of use whether you're hitting the same file over and over or whether you're expanding an existing file. Early SSD use often lead to dead drives (or, more often, CompactFlash cards) from page file writes, but that's before controllers implemented wear leveling, not to mention the increase in flash durability as a whole.
No. Can't you sue radio stations for allowing you to hear copyrighted music for free? Can't you sue the library for allowing you to read copyrighted books for free? Didn't think so.
Just because it's copyrighted doesn't mean someone has to charge for it. The term simply specifies reproduction (copy) rights. Slashdot can't require membership fees to read comments since they'd be charging for content they don't own. You can't go republish comments without permission, especially not for commercial use. It gets a bit hairy when you get into something like shouting out people's comments through a megaphone, as it technically is a copyright violation (except for the shouter's own comments) though they were written in the spirit of sharing information with something along the lines of a CC-BY-NC license implied. By posting the comment, we imply publication authorization (if we didn't explicitly give it when signing up) granted to Slashdot.
Unfortunately, that statement tends to be right. I've looked at the top-100 lists on TPB, and despite what everyone is saying about indie artists gaining a name for themselves and other such bullshit, it's the pop crap that tends to come out on top: http://thepiratebay.org/top/100. At the time of posting, the Britney Spears album in question is #12 on that list. Also included: top 1000 pop hits of the 80s (??), Alicia Keys, Kayne West, and Timbaland.
Sure, I've made my contributions to the placement of stuff on the list (though not for that tripe), but I still pay for the music. I bought a CD just last night. Sure, I'd downloaded the album probably two years ago and listen to tracks from it very frequently, but I still want to support the artists I like. I happened to be walking by the music section, noticed it was on sale for ten bucks, and thought it was about time the artists saw whatever trivial amount of money for my enjoyment of their work. Generally I avoid it on principle since all that about the record industry taking far more than their fair share, artists get screwed on the deal, but I don't have a mailing address for them to send cash.
Why would you waste that much space as part of a disk with effectively zero seek time on HD movies? They don't need that kind of performance - even a 4200RPM standard hard drive would have more than enough throughput (and with tech like accelerometer-based head parking, durability shouldn't be too much of an issue). Use it as an OS disk. Better yet, use it for databases - the seek times would be fantastic for the application, and unless you're constantly updating rows (rather than just inserting new ones), the write cycle limit on flash-based storage is unlikely to become an issue.
It's not as if you need a portable video library anyways. Stick a few on your device and go. Your battery life is by far going to be the limiting factor. Apple would be much better off trying to create a mobile video streaming device than to waste so much flash memory on a portable device.
Sure, in five years then I'll probably have a terabyte of flash memory in my car key that only costs eight bucks. And at that point, this kind of thing would make sense. Right now, that's a TON of flash storage that would carry a huge price that would make it beyond impractical for portables. If you want a mobile HD player, create something with a 720p screen and one of those brand new 500GB laptop drives and stick half a gig of RAM in as a massive buffer.
I can pick up a spindle of 100 DVDs (470GB) for under thirty bucks. While I see your point, the crossover point is going to be MUCH further out there with the media costs currently so comparable.
But by the time this is available, things could be much cheaper. And more importantly, the puny capacity of a DVD would be hardly fit to wipe your posterior at that point.
Quite spotty. I've got a spot about a two-inch cube that gets three to four bars (of five) worth of signal in my house, where the rest of the house is one bar or no signal (likewise for most of outside, except for a small patch at the bottom of the driveway). A couple miles from my house, it's 4-5 bars consistently.
iPhone/AT&T just outside of Nashua, NH, for what it's worth. The situation was the same on Verizon where I last lived (Williston, VT - where, for the record, the iPhone works perfectly).
Uhh yeah. "Phone number" doesn't mean much to you, does it? IMEI and other such acronymed nonsense be damned - everyone knows what a phone number is and what it's good for (and in the case of locked handsets, what handset it's attached to - not that it matters), and the phone number is attached to every single call.
The Facebook generation? I'm twenty, and this must be the fifth generation label I've received in the last year or two (thank god that "myspace generation" didn't stick). More importantly, I think that notion is bullshit. I've been using computers since I was about three - today that doesn't mean much, but computers didn't have hard drives back when I started. Anyways, I've tried pretty much every form of computer-based communication in existence, and I always end up using email almost exclusively. It's portable, absolutely everyone has it (no worries of MSN vs AIM), and is completely free (unlike SMS/MMS, etc). Yes, the internal messaging on sites like Facebook is probably about as widespread among my friends that I've added, but that's only a relatively small subset of my contents - and in any case, we'll all be on some other site next year and Zuckerberg will be sobbing in a corner for not having taken the insanely huge offers when they were on the table.
Maybe it's because my computer history is very different than most people my age, or maybe because it's just logical that something as easy to use and as widespread as email isn't going to go away anytime soon, while other services have either come and gone or never caught on in the first place. Pretty much every internet-connected device can handle email plus one other protocol, but it's email rather than that one other protocol that's on EVERYTHING. Like so many other things, it's not really perfect for any one application (though if it had been encrypted from the start, I'd say otherwise; unfortunately, it's really too late to get encryption everywhere), but by and large it works well enough for just about anything.
And iTunes has something in the EULA about not for use in nuclear missile defense systems, or something to that effect. It's a standard disclaimer. I don't think anything software-based is really truly safe for a mission-critical system; if you must, direct machine code (or assembly if you're not Woz) is probably the only thing that's pretty impossible to have language-related issues.
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He was modded funny rather than insightful, so it can't be used as evidence.
Which is a good thing, since it would be evidence against all of us.
No, I'm not worried.
Seriously.
That's a problem for elementary schools, not colleges.
Well, it's a problem for high schools too, but that's because it's school computers and HS students tend to be dicks when it comes to other people's property. That issue applies to both slot- and tray-loading drives, though.
That's a completely different scope of work. Spreadsheets are fine for personal use. Even sharing with one person can get hairy unless you have version control in place - and if you're smart enough to set up version control, you'll already be doing this with a DB. A list of what movies you want to see isn't generally a multi-user collaboration.
Though if policy allows it, a Google Spreadsheet could still apply fairly well in this kind of situation. It retains all of the freeform flexibility of a spreadsheet while giving the availability of a DB-driven app. Presumably if you'll have access to a networked, DB-driven app (whether it's a web page or a standalone exe), you'll have web access. Might as well make that work for you and go with something that already exists.
Yes, exactly. And it's only the uninstaller that's damaging - the program itself is just useless. In order to be damaged by this, you have to, in order:
1) Jailbreak your iPhone
2) Add standard third-party sources
3) Download and install specific, known good third-party applications (the BSD subsystem and a few misc utils by Erica Sadun, I believe)
4) Manually add a third-party application XML feed (typing in the feed address by hand, as it's not listed under third party sources)
5) Find and download this application
6) Uninstall this application, which then (thanks to a bad uninstaller line in the XML) removes the apps from step 3
You can repair the damage fairly easily as well, by simply editing the XML for the installed apps, removing the ones that were damaged from that list (since their uninstaller fails as the files are already missing), and reinstall them. No damage is even done unless you uninstall the problem app, and the damage only messes up a select few third-party tools.
It's not quite as simple as someone with an EDGE/WiFi card in their laptop noticing your presence and zapping something to your phone over the airwaves, or even as simple as visiting a malicious website (though the latter is certainly plausible if you're running an un-jailbroken phone with 1.1.1 firmware or earlier).
I'd say $2 rentals is more than reasonable. Apple's downloads range from $3-5 for one day, and while I can't speak for blockbuster, most small independent stores are at least $4 for a few days.
Sure, unlimited might be throttled a bit if you're clearly just ripping and returning, but they have these crazy things called operating costs that they have to cover: postage on both directions and buying the movies (and replacing stuff that becomes damaged, though I'd assume the person doing the damage is charged) in addition to the standard costs of doing business (employees, utilities, legal, etc).
While they definitely have bulk deals set up with the post office, that's still going to be a good chunk of the two bucks. Then knock off the price of the disc per rental (40c maybe? Figure it's bought for around $12 and gets rented out to 30 people before it needs replacing). That doesn't leave much room for bill-paying revenue.
Sounds about right. This so-called 'worm' is nothing more than a useless file - THAT YOU HAVE TO CHOOSE TO INSTALL - with a bad uninstaller script. It's about as much a worm as typing 'sudo rm -rf /' into the terminal because some stranger on the internet said it's a good idea (for the uninformed, it's a great idea, and definitely try it and give it your root password when prompted)*.
The only known actual exploit on the iPhone is the TIFF exploit that JailBreakMe.com uses for powers of good (which, while jailbreaking the phone, also patches the exploit it used to do so). People that didn't use that hack likely updated to 1.1.2 firmware, which also patches that hole.
No, it's (most irrelevantly) not a corporate blackberry replacement. It's not really perfect at anything, though I'll say that the solitaire game really lends it self fantastically to the touch interface. But unlike most multifunction devices which really half-ass everything, it does most things quite well and the sacrifices made are understandable and more importantly are not deal-breakers.
*Hey, I'm a stranger on the internet. What did you expect, candy?
Well, there's nothing fundamentally wrong with that. A spreadsheet is effectively just a less structured database, and given that you're talking about freeform data... and in any case those kind of lists aren't going to have enough data that a spreadsheet becomes inappropriate.
And to be honest, does it really matter what method they're using to make their lists? I'd rather be sent a CSV than a SQL file, and despite being a proponent of open standards, I can still open up an Excel file no problem. Yeah, I'd prefer to see just sharing out a page on Google Docs or just being handed a sheet of paper, but that's life.
Ah, the iPod argument all over again.
The last time this was an issue for me, it was probably 1999 with one of those awesome Thinkpads with the Ultrabay flip-up keyboard and a Ni-Cd battery. I've owned three iPods and an iPhone and all have had zero battery issues; likewise for all Li-Ion laptops I've used that I can remember, which is quite a few.
Removing ease of access allows you to remove the components that bring that ease of access. Hinges, doors, flaps, and sockets all take space. Sticking it all behind a big shell takes less space. Apple wanted a thin notebook, so guess which route they took.
It's not a subnotebook. It's a thin notebook that sacrificed an optical drive to be really thin. This is exactly the same width and depth as the standard Macbook (give or take a couple hundredths of an inch). It even retains the insanely thick bezels around the edge of the screen of the Macbook. The eee is a subnotebook. This is just a very attractive, very thin standard notebook.
/wanted the new 12" that apparently just wasn't meant to be. desperately. *sobbing*
But yeah, you're spot-on about the lock-in nonsense. If you want a thin machine, ditching the optical drive and moving to a 1.8" drive is the way to do it. It's been rumored for months that if Apple made a thin/small/light/sub notebook, it wouldn't have an optical drive. It's not like streaming DVD-quality video over 802.11n is a challenge - I can stream 1080p through two floors where I can't even see 802.11g signal.
4) IQ test the entire country. People who fail are pushed off the nearest bridge. People who get below a point determined to be reasonably intelligent (100 is average, not smart) get sent to Texas, which is to be denounced as a state.
I think from there, the problems should solve themselves.
Like so many things, UPNP is a tradeoff between security and convenience. Want a stronger password? You have to type in an annoying password every time you want to do anything. Want secure WiFi? Then make sure you write down your 64+character alphanumeric nonsense passphrase and be sure to add your MAC address into the allowed users table, after going through a second insane password to hit your router's config panel. Want to lower the risk of a break-in? Then set or open both a lock and deadbolt every time you pass through the door.
In the case of UPNP, I go for convenience. I know the risks, but I also know enough about how to avoid this that the convenience is worth the risk for me.
Transfer distance relating to security is a non-issue unless you have some really idiotic software designers. Unless your device is not only broadcasting its presence (in a rather Bonjour-ish way) but doing so without either having a system password or at the very least something to authorize the transfer, it's not going to be like an RFID tag that just spits out data if you get close enough with the right gear.
Of course, counting on not having idiotic coders is a fairly big risk to take these days. I mean... so long as they test things - we all make mistakes (just yesterday I spotted a bug in the login system for a site I'm making that was using "=" instead of "===" so it always validated to true, luckily it was an easy enough fix), it's just a matter of making sure we catch them. Given the quality of so much 1.0 software (or any major version without a point release) these days, I'd say that there should be a hell of a market for QA outsourcing.
This is true. A friend of mine is a huge Obama support (as I am for Paul), and neither of us genuinely believe that there was fraud. I certainly can't rule it out and I'm more skeptical than is my friend, but I tend to be that way. His reasoning is that Obama's position percentage-wise didn't change much from the polls; rather, Hillary picked up a lot more undecided votes and took some away from Edwards from something he said regarding that whole tearing up thing. I doubt it happened because I think Paul would have come in much lower than the 8-9% or so he got had there been fraud.
More importantly, both candidates really had pretty poor buzz and advertisements going on due to a lack of organization. Paul's ads here were almost entirely focused on illegal immigration, where they would have been much better focused on civil liberties, personal freedoms, and probably economic policy. Obama's supporters used the same approach that they used in Iowa, which is really no good around here both because of the difference between a caucus and a primary and also that with such an energy- and buzz-driven campaign, going door-to-door the day of the election is not going to be nearly as effective as getting people at the election sites trying to sway the undecideds.
Still, I'd never rule anything out (I really am a conspiracy theorist at heart), and wouldn't be surprised if there was fraud or even genuinely unintentional error. But I don't suspect it to be the case here as the results weren't too far off from what I thought given the opinions of most people I knew. If anyone should be screaming fraud, it's me - and I'm not.
I'm pretty sure that everyone who owns an iPhone already has a copy of iTunes installed. It's not at all unrelated to the phone, as you suggest is the case. Remember, it's more than just a phone, and iTunes handles a lot more than activation. At least it HAS that interface - most phones you're lucky to be able to attach to your PC without a $30 cable and hugely overpriced and gimped software (this is finally starting to slowly change, thankfully), and you're quite limited in how you can interact. For all the flaws of the iPhone - and I know about all of them as an owner - it's still a solid piece of hardware and the way it interfaces with my computer is half the reason I bought the thing. Linux users being SOL is not exactly a new thing, and it's certainly not limited to a single phone.
But yeah, re: activation, bureaucracy and a good chunk of change are indeed part of the painful process. Back when I had to get my previous phone with Verizon, it nearly did qualify as torture (the experience was horrendously awful, not to mention the wait - I was able to put my name on a list, go to the mall for lunch and check out their small Verizon store, come back, and still wait another half hour, only to wait another hour after finally getting help to actually buy the thing). My iPhone activation could have gone smoother, but I managed to have everything going against me when I was doing so (Vermont number with Verizon though I'd since moved; AT&T wasn't legally allowed to let me keep that number as they don't offer service in VT, regardless of the fact that my home and billing address were in a location where they do indeed offer service. This among several other things that wouldn't have effected most people). I still considered the process, on the whole, less painful than the last time I'd dealt with Verizon.
That was my point. But DBs are not like a page file where you're constantly banging on the same file with updates. Unless your drive is very near full capacity, this will generally be a non-issue from wear leveling regardless of use whether you're hitting the same file over and over or whether you're expanding an existing file. Early SSD use often lead to dead drives (or, more often, CompactFlash cards) from page file writes, but that's before controllers implemented wear leveling, not to mention the increase in flash durability as a whole.
No. Can't you sue radio stations for allowing you to hear copyrighted music for free? Can't you sue the library for allowing you to read copyrighted books for free? Didn't think so.
Just because it's copyrighted doesn't mean someone has to charge for it. The term simply specifies reproduction (copy) rights. Slashdot can't require membership fees to read comments since they'd be charging for content they don't own. You can't go republish comments without permission, especially not for commercial use. It gets a bit hairy when you get into something like shouting out people's comments through a megaphone, as it technically is a copyright violation (except for the shouter's own comments) though they were written in the spirit of sharing information with something along the lines of a CC-BY-NC license implied. By posting the comment, we imply publication authorization (if we didn't explicitly give it when signing up) granted to Slashdot.
Unfortunately, that statement tends to be right. I've looked at the top-100 lists on TPB, and despite what everyone is saying about indie artists gaining a name for themselves and other such bullshit, it's the pop crap that tends to come out on top: http://thepiratebay.org/top/100. At the time of posting, the Britney Spears album in question is #12 on that list. Also included: top 1000 pop hits of the 80s (??), Alicia Keys, Kayne West, and Timbaland.
Sure, I've made my contributions to the placement of stuff on the list (though not for that tripe), but I still pay for the music. I bought a CD just last night. Sure, I'd downloaded the album probably two years ago and listen to tracks from it very frequently, but I still want to support the artists I like. I happened to be walking by the music section, noticed it was on sale for ten bucks, and thought it was about time the artists saw whatever trivial amount of money for my enjoyment of their work. Generally I avoid it on principle since all that about the record industry taking far more than their fair share, artists get screwed on the deal, but I don't have a mailing address for them to send cash.
Why would you waste that much space as part of a disk with effectively zero seek time on HD movies? They don't need that kind of performance - even a 4200RPM standard hard drive would have more than enough throughput (and with tech like accelerometer-based head parking, durability shouldn't be too much of an issue). Use it as an OS disk. Better yet, use it for databases - the seek times would be fantastic for the application, and unless you're constantly updating rows (rather than just inserting new ones), the write cycle limit on flash-based storage is unlikely to become an issue.
It's not as if you need a portable video library anyways. Stick a few on your device and go. Your battery life is by far going to be the limiting factor. Apple would be much better off trying to create a mobile video streaming device than to waste so much flash memory on a portable device.
Sure, in five years then I'll probably have a terabyte of flash memory in my car key that only costs eight bucks. And at that point, this kind of thing would make sense. Right now, that's a TON of flash storage that would carry a huge price that would make it beyond impractical for portables. If you want a mobile HD player, create something with a 720p screen and one of those brand new 500GB laptop drives and stick half a gig of RAM in as a massive buffer.
I can pick up a spindle of 100 DVDs (470GB) for under thirty bucks. While I see your point, the crossover point is going to be MUCH further out there with the media costs currently so comparable.
But by the time this is available, things could be much cheaper. And more importantly, the puny capacity of a DVD would be hardly fit to wipe your posterior at that point.
Too late *cry*
oh ffs, the captcha is "jerking". Thanks for adding insult to injury, Slashdot.
Tell that to Britannica.
Quite spotty. I've got a spot about a two-inch cube that gets three to four bars (of five) worth of signal in my house, where the rest of the house is one bar or no signal (likewise for most of outside, except for a small patch at the bottom of the driveway). A couple miles from my house, it's 4-5 bars consistently.
iPhone/AT&T just outside of Nashua, NH, for what it's worth. The situation was the same on Verizon where I last lived (Williston, VT - where, for the record, the iPhone works perfectly).
Uhh yeah. "Phone number" doesn't mean much to you, does it? IMEI and other such acronymed nonsense be damned - everyone knows what a phone number is and what it's good for (and in the case of locked handsets, what handset it's attached to - not that it matters), and the phone number is attached to every single call.
The Facebook generation? I'm twenty, and this must be the fifth generation label I've received in the last year or two (thank god that "myspace generation" didn't stick). More importantly, I think that notion is bullshit. I've been using computers since I was about three - today that doesn't mean much, but computers didn't have hard drives back when I started. Anyways, I've tried pretty much every form of computer-based communication in existence, and I always end up using email almost exclusively. It's portable, absolutely everyone has it (no worries of MSN vs AIM), and is completely free (unlike SMS/MMS, etc). Yes, the internal messaging on sites like Facebook is probably about as widespread among my friends that I've added, but that's only a relatively small subset of my contents - and in any case, we'll all be on some other site next year and Zuckerberg will be sobbing in a corner for not having taken the insanely huge offers when they were on the table.
Maybe it's because my computer history is very different than most people my age, or maybe because it's just logical that something as easy to use and as widespread as email isn't going to go away anytime soon, while other services have either come and gone or never caught on in the first place. Pretty much every internet-connected device can handle email plus one other protocol, but it's email rather than that one other protocol that's on EVERYTHING. Like so many other things, it's not really perfect for any one application (though if it had been encrypted from the start, I'd say otherwise; unfortunately, it's really too late to get encryption everywhere), but by and large it works well enough for just about anything.
And iTunes has something in the EULA about not for use in nuclear missile defense systems, or something to that effect. It's a standard disclaimer. I don't think anything software-based is really truly safe for a mission-critical system; if you must, direct machine code (or assembly if you're not Woz) is probably the only thing that's pretty impossible to have language-related issues.